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A onetime foulmouthed white rapper remade as an icon of right-wing country rebellion. An iconic disco-pop outfit with a crossover hit often understood to be about gay cruising that has become a global sports-and-bar-mitzvah anthem.<\/p>\n
These are the sorts of contradictory figures who have long animated and energized American pop music, the art form where competing interest groups and creative urges are in the closest quarters, and most likely to collide in unanticipatedly productive ways. The stew of American pop is messy, the result of centuries of creative crossover, willing and forced and sometimes unpredictable.<\/p>\n
So maybe it\u2019s not a surprise, then, that even onstage at President-elect Donald J. Trump\u2019s Make America Great Again Victory Rally on Sunday afternoon at the Capital One Arena \u2014 seemingly a place inhospitable to these narratives of collaborative difference \u2014 these tugs of war persisted.<\/p>\n
In the speeches \u2014 from Mr. Trump and many of his surrogates \u2014 there was nativism and isolationism and promises of record deportations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
And yet for a party and movement built in part on exclusion and a campaign marked at times by race-baiting, there were conspicuous overtures to diversity and inclusion, and sly acknowledgments of the power of the multiracial stew of American pop.<\/p>\n
There was Kid Rock, his voice pockmarked and powerful, singing \u201cAll Summer Long,\u201d his winning invocation of \u201cSweet Home Alabama,\u201d before putting on a red Make America Great Again ball cap and taking a turn scratching on his D.J.\u2019s turntable. In a video message during the performance, Mr. Trump promised to Make America Rock Again, interspersed with footage of Run-DMC songs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Billy Ray Cyrus, who was billed as one of the performers at the rally but who wasn\u2019t heard apart from sound checking, would have deepened this curious narrative as a former country pretty boy rescued in late career by working with a queer hip-hop newcomer<\/a>, Lil Nas X, on \u201cOld Town Road.\u201d<\/p>\n And of course there were Village People, who performed \u201cY.M.C.A.\u201d at the rally\u2019s conclusion with Mr. Trump behind them, shimmying and occasionally singing along.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Did the song\u2019s origin story matter? It did not. (Victor Willis, the group\u2019s frontman and sole remaining original member, made headlines last month<\/a> when he posted on social media that the song is \u201cnot really a gay anthem.\u201d)<\/p>\n But of course this is how Mr. Trump views music: as theme songs, fight songs, soundtracks for memories more than works of art. He leans toward anthems rinsed clean of meaning, so long as they\u2019re memorably durable. He walked onstage to Lee Greenwood serenading him with \u201cGod Bless the U.S.A.,\u201d as if accepting homecoming king coronation at the prom.<\/p>\n The pre-rally soundtrack, apart from the occasional contemporary intruder \u2014 Bruno Mars\u2019s \u201cVersace on the Floor,\u201d The Weeknd\u2019s \u201cStarboy\u201d \u2014 skewed four to five decades old. It was largely the sound of Studio 54 and its offshoots, wrung through layers of history and irony and post-history until nothing is left but the beat.<\/p>\n Most of the speakers were introduced with flickers of hard-rock guitar, as if to reassure (and energize) the majority white crowd. But the messages they delivered were in places more nuanced. Dana White, chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, reminded the crowd of Mr. Trump\u2019s success with nonwhite voters, as did Mr. Trump himself in his speech, keen to paint MAGA as a multiracial movement.<\/p>\n But the contradictions were never far from the surface. The Puerto Rican superstar Anuel AA embraced Mr. Trump<\/a>, saying that he was onstage to speak \u201con behalf of all the Spanish community\u201d and describing the backlash he received for supporting Mr. Trump. Just minutes later Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, decried President Biden\u2019s border policy and Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News anchor, touted Facebook and McDonald\u2019s doing away with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.<\/p>\n It was the ultimate in having it both ways \u2014 slyly embracing the spoils of American diversity while forcefully arguing against D.E.I. Using the optics and sonics of integration as a soft weapon against their own furthering. The purpose of the rally was intended to be clear, but the music suggested a far messier \u2014 and still unresolved \u2014 truth underneath.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n